All in this together? Not according to our local councils

Allison Pearson on why Eric Pickles' tough talk hasn't done the trick with
wasteful local government; a multicultural Midsomer mystery; the Japanese
disaster - and the results of her Justin Bieber competition.

On Monday, as I was settling down to watch University Challenge, the phone rang. “I’m calling on behalf of Cambridgeshire County Council,” a woman trilled. Did I have time to answer some questions about my relationship with the council? Now, in general, I would rather be strapped in a high-backed leather chair and have my eyes pecked out by vultures while being quizzed on pretenders to the English throne by Jeremy Paxman (“Oh, come ON! Perkin Warbeck, you fool”) than spend a second of my evening with a market researcher. This time, I was genuinely curious to see how our council could justify spending money on a poll during the most savage budget cuts of modern times.

You get the idea. Each question was weighted in such a way that, before you knew it, you found yourself confirming that the council combined the saintly forbearance of Aung San Suu Kyi with the strategic nous of Montgomery of Alamein.

What should the council be focusing on, asked the researcher. “Basic services,” I harrumphed Paxmanly. “Taking away the rubbish, provisions for children and the elderly. NOT spending money we haven’t got on ridiculous market research.” “We haven’t got a box for that,” said the woman sadly. “Shall I put No Comment?”

I don’t want a first-name-terms relationship with my council; I want them to fill the bike-swallowing crater near my daughter’s school. And how much do you reckon their telephone survey is costing – 20 grand, 30? Definitely enough to pay for a librarian when 13 libraries are being “reviewed”, with self-service machines (£7,000 each) being brought in to replace actual book-cherishing humans.

Do I sound annoyed? Good. Cambridgeshire County Council employs six press officers. You might think one would be ample, but our Shire hall has an entire communications department, forsooth. One of the press officers, let’s call him Gary, has specific responsibility for Cambridge’s Guided Bus Service. This, I should mention, is a bus service which does not exist, probably never will exist and, thus far, has cost the public more than £180 million. Gary’s job is to put a positive spin on an unfolding fiasco. I am assured that he does it beautifully, but wouldn’t the public rather provide the resources to, say, keep 10 vulnerable old people in their own homes than employ a man to publicise the virtues of a non-existent bus? It’s a tough one, isn’t it?

When David Cameron furrows his brow and vows, “We’re all in this together”, is it any wonder that the British people jeer back, “OH NO, WE’RE NOT!” We know civil servants are no more likely to axe themselves than turkeys are to vote for Christmas.

Eric Pickles, that delectable love-child of Humpty Dumpty and Ena Sharples, may talk tough, but he is hamstrung by the Government’s strategy of devolved localism. Is it really such a good idea to give even more power to the regions when a sense of grandiose entitlement has spread like fungus through councils across the land? Suffolk is closing libraries, has sacked lollipop ladies and cancelled children’s travel cards. Meanwhile, Freedom of Information requests reveal that Andrea Hill, Suffolk’s chief executive, who is paid £218,592 a year, spent £14,188 of public money on a leadership adviser who gave her lessons in how to “liberate herself” to do her job better. For £525 an hour plus VAT, I’m sure we’d all be delighted to suggest how Mrs Hill might liberate herself. Slashing her own monster pay packet in half and distributing the excess to starving librarians would be a start.

Under New Labour, town hall spending rose from £89 billion to £164 billion per year. Pay for the highest three per cent of public servants went up by 64 per cent. Nine thousand earn more than the Prime Minister. Individuals you would not trust to run a bra section in M&S were suddenly expecting salaries commensurate with the private sector. Managers paid themselves annual bonuses for “meeting targets”, which used to be called “doing your job”.

This week, Will Hutton’s report on top pay in the public sector suggested what might be done about this racket. In a complex formula, Hutton says chief executives should have an element of their basic pay at risk. They can earn it back by meeting certain targets, or lose it if they fail. I prefer Hutton’s original suggestion that there should be a maximum pay multiple of 20:1 between the most senior and most junior employee. Sadly, that would never work. Why? Because it’s fair and affordable and because our most enlightened public servants are firm believers in “fairness”, just not when it affects them.

Sorry, folks, councils are never going to volunteer to do the right thing. So we need to shame them into it. They need reminding that the People’s Money is for the good of the people, not for Cheerleading Development Officers. For every Sure Start scheme they try to close, for every cut, let the local media expose the unnecessary jobs that the town hall has opted to protect while the public bleeds.

Back in Cambridge, one Green councillor proposed that all the councillors should cut their own allowances by 5 per cent because “we need to be seen to be sharing some of the pain”. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected, which tells you everything you need to know about us all being in this together.

Do you strongly agree with this statement, tentatively agree, tentatively disagree? Answers on a postcard to Eric Pickles.

- Right, all you armchair detectives out there, here’s a selection of murders and weapons. Try to puzzle out where they took place: Stabbed with tent peg, battered to death by cricket bat, impaled on pitchfork, crushed under falling drinks cabinet, killed by combine-harvester, murdered by bell-ringers and – my all-time favourite – drowned in a cauldron of soup.

It has to be Midsomer, that forever green and pleasant – if homicidal – corner of England.

Brian True-May, the producer, is now a chief suspect himself, having said that Midsomer wouldn’t work if ethnic minorities were involved. “Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them.”

I am as amused as the next viewer by clumsy attempts to crowbar black and Asian actors into implausible settings. Mr True-May is entitled to maintain Midsomer in its Fifties timewarp. But what he is not entitled to say is, “We’re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.”

If Jessica Ennis takes the gold medal in the London Olympics, as we pray she does, will the Sheffield-born athlete be allowed into Mr True-May’s bastion of “Englishness”? Or is she doomed, as a black woman, to be allowed to represent her country and bring it glory, yet always to be regarded as somehow other?

If Brian True-May believes that, then he really is in the soup. And he can stay there.

- The Japanese ambassador told Radio 4 that his people had been humbled and awed by the power of nature. We, in turn, have been humbled and awed by the grace under pressure of the Japanese. Passengers stuck in a blizzard at Terminal Five have shown less courtesy and restraint than the survivors of Minami-Sanriku, a town that disappeared on March 11.

Some commentators have shuddered over “earthquake porn” and, it’s true, there is something in human nature which makes us want to gaze on the worst, though not always for the worst of reasons. It’s hard to believe our eyes so we look again and again at the pictures, to make sure. The black wave that almost lazily flips a yacht over. Those muddy acres etched with the ghostly tramlines of hundreds of houses.

In all the coverage, one phrase you hear over and over is that the devastation is unimaginable. But that’s not true. Anyone can imagine it. All you have to see is the picture of the big, round clock, stopped by the water at precisely quarter to three. Stop all the clocks, W H Auden said in his great poem of grieving. “Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood/For nothing now can come to any good.”

Because at the time when the tsunami hit, children were in school and their mothers and fathers in work or at home. To be separated from your children at that moment, not to be able to run to their rescue or even live to know their fate. “He was so far away from me,” a young mother explained. This we can imagine very well.

- What possessed me to offer free Justin Bieber tickets for tonight at the O2? I now know how Christians felt at feeding time in the Colosseum. From across the country, lionesses and their crazy cubs roared into my inbox, all claiming to be the biggest Belieber.

Thousands of you wrote in. I really wish I had tickets to give everyone. In the end I picked six fans who seemed the most deserving, or at least demented. John, father of nine-year-old Jaime Lea Fitzgerald, wrote to nominate his wonderful daughter who had one hell of a start in life, being in and out of foster homes till she was three. Jaime is now a complete chatterbox and will be right at the front with her proud mum.

Sarah McGough begged for tickets for daughter Jenny and her friend, Susel. “I think these two young ladies would be in for a night to remember for the rest of their lives.”

Last, but not least, Millie Tyrrell had the cunning idea of emailing every five minutes for three days, pleading on Facebook and ambushing me on Twitter. Millie’s friend, Mimi Jackson, moved in with a pincer movement so I capitulated before they showed up in my bedroom.

Girls, if that boy Justin doesn’t marry you, it won’t be for lack of effort. Have a wonderful time.